My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• Fed Raises Rates and Says It Isn’t Done Yet. We Think It Is. Even as the Fed says it expects “ongoing” rate hikes, we expect the next move will be to cut rates by year-end. (Morningstar)
• Boom Times for Online Classic Car Sales: The pandemic changed the auction picture somewhat, giving a boost to eBay Motors, BringATrailer.com, and other online auction/sales companies. The wisdom initially had been that online sales were O.K. for smaller purchases, but for big-ticket items enthusiasts needed to see the cars in person. That assumption has been proven wrong, though traditional auction houses also did well in 2022—with values climbing on collector cars. (Barron’s) see also The Pandemic Used-Car Boom Is Coming to an Abrupt End: Dealership are seeing sales and prices drop as consumers tighten their belts, putting financial pressure on companies, like Carvana, that grew fast in recent years. (New York Times)
• The Unusual Crew Behind Tether, Crypto’s Pre-Eminent Stablecoin: The stablecoin has become a lucrative business at center of crypto economy. (Wall Street Journal)
• Tulipomania! On Holland’s legendary tulip bubble, which burst today in 1637. (Paris Review)
• Best Practices for CIO Succession Planning Require Long-Term Preparation: Carrying out executive transitions smoothly requires thoughtful processes established well in advance. (Chief Investment Officer)
• How we fell out of love with voice assistants: For the past three years voice assistant use has been falling and adoption continues to slow. (BBC)
• Welcome to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s desert dystopia in the making: Western architects are scrambling to work on a Saudi Arabian dream: a city founded on a 170km-long line of mirrored towers. But will it end up as a series of broken pieces? (Prospect)
• The 5 Main Factions Of The House GOP And how they’re likely to govern for the next two years. A number of important fissures define the current House congressional GOP — and the embrace of Trump and Trumpism is just one of them. Voting records, ties to the establishment and caucus membership, for instance, all played a role in how I measured Republican House members against one another, drawing on data as well as expert opinion. • The 5 Main Factions Of The House GOP: And how they’re likely to govern for the next two years. (FiveThirtyEight)
• How to Age Gracefully in Hollywood: A TV comedy writer on how to survive a business model of ageism. (The Ankler)
• Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews? An inquiry into how critics stumble. (The Honest Broker)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with William Cohan, M&A investment banker at Lazard Frères, Merrill Lynch, and JP Morgan Chase. He is also an accomplished author, was a columnist for Vanity Fair’s Hive, and a founder of Puck. He is also a NYT bestselling author of multiple books on Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lazard Frères. His latest book on GE is titled: “Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.”
It continues to look like a soft landing
Source: NBER via Apollo
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We will be at the ETF conference in Miami next week; no reads Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday…
